What's wrong with "feeling good" in training

Smoove wrote:

As is often the case on these boards, we are tending towards the extremes without looking for the nuance.

I suspect that what the coach was getting at was far more subtle than "no pain, no gain" and all of those other tropes, and it isn't that he wanted his athletes to feel bad, but rather that they are focusing their energy on feeling good at regionals and nationals, and if that means training through those other races and feeling a bit tired as a result, so be it.

I work with individual athletes, not teams, so my experience is different than that of some others posting here. But in working with individual athletes, we commonly design our training for a goal race (most often a marathon or a half marathon). Everything in training is oriented toward that goal race, and performance at interim races may suffer as a result. For example, I had a woman that was training for the Chicago Marathon this year. She had several other races on her race calendar during the training cycle, including Peachtree and several local races. Our focus was on getting her a big PR and potentially an OTQ in Chicago. Everything in the training plan was oriented toward that. That meant that the week before Peachtree was one of her peak mileage weeks. We made a decision that we were not going to rearrange the training calendar to back off at all to perhaps get a better result at that race, because the focus was on Chicago. She ran an awful time for her fitness (although it was still her best time at Peachtree), and we kept moving on.

It wasn't that I wanted her to feel like crap that week, it was just that I didn't care if she was prepped and ready for that race because that race wasn't the goal for her training. Same thing with our local races - we trained through those too. But when she had a good day and ran a new 5k PR three weeks before Chicago, I wasn't at all bothered that she felt good, I was still just focused on the fact that her training was all oriented toward Chicago, where she ran a 2:30+ PR but narrowly missed her OTQ.

In fact, CoachB, I think one of your athletes probably had a similar race profile during that time, with a series of so-so races leading up to Chicago, but then crushing Chicago and getting a healthy OTQ in the process. I suspect that your attitude toward her interim races is what the Stanford coach's was trying to convey.

prefan wrote:

Nothing at all is wrong with "feeling good at practice." Foolish distance running coaches run their teams into the ground with bullsh*t slogans like "no pain, no gain", "never take a day off", and garbage like that. I feel sorry for the runners on their teams because there are some coaches like that in the area I coach and every year I see their teams shoot out of the gate strong, often beating the team I coach, and then we are killing them at the end of the year in championship meets while their team is injured, stale, well past peak fitness, and just wants the season to be over. Every. Single. Year. It's not a coincidence. If you never give your athletes rest/recovery days over the course of the season, they may run well early, even into the middle of the season, and some rare individuals may thrive (although I suspect those runners bagged some hard days to get recovery they knew they needed), but the teams usually have a hard time replicating their early and mid season races because they are too tired, stale, or injured to run well. And as their race results deteriorate, their confidence wanes as well. They've raced it away in practice and earlier meets and ground themselves down too much to gain from a little bit of rest near the end of the season to try to peak.

heyyo wrote:

Smoove wrote:

As is often the case on these boards, we are tending towards the extremes without looking for the nuance.

I suspect that what the coach was getting at was far more subtle than "no pain, no gain" and all of those other tropes, and it isn't that he wanted his athletes to feel bad, but rather that they are focusing their energy on feeling good at regionals and nationals, and if that means training through those other races and feeling a bit tired as a result, so be it.

I work with individual athletes, not teams, so my experience is different than that of some others posting here. But in working with individual athletes, we commonly design our training for a goal race (most often a marathon or a half marathon). Everything in training is oriented toward that goal race, and performance at interim races may suffer as a result. For example, I had a woman that was training for the Chicago Marathon this year. She had several other races on her race calendar during the training cycle, including Peachtree and several local races. Our focus was on getting her a big PR and potentially an OTQ in Chicago. Everything in the training plan was oriented toward that. That meant that the week before Peachtree was one of her peak mileage weeks. We made a decision that we were not going to rearrange the training calendar to back off at all to perhaps get a better result at that race, because the focus was on Chicago. She ran an awful time for her fitness (although it was still her best time at Peachtree), and we kept moving on.

It wasn't that I wanted her to feel like crap that week, it was just that I didn't care if she was prepped and ready for that race because that race wasn't the goal for her training. Same thing with our local races - we trained through those too. But when she had a good day and ran a new 5k PR three weeks before Chicago, I wasn't at all bothered that she felt good, I was still just focused on the fact that her training was all oriented toward Chicago, where she ran a 2:30+ PR but narrowly missed her OTQ.

In fact, CoachB, I think one of your athletes probably had a similar race profile during that time, with a series of so-so races leading up to Chicago, but then crushing Chicago and getting a healthy OTQ in the process. I suspect that your attitude toward her interim races is what the Stanford coach's was trying to convey.

May I ask, what's the purpose of the athlete racing at Peachtree or other local road races while fatigued, with a likely outcome of having an awful race given the athlete's fitness? Wouldn't a controlled workout serve more purpose if the training cycle is geared towards 1 race?

I think there are some reasonable answers and instances where it still makes sense, but curious why in this case. Professional runners tend to do so, but I suspect its simply for the $$, and not for any training or fitness purpose.

Nowadays it seems like a pretty typical approach to training for marathons to go all in for 1 marathon goal race and then lay a bunch of eggs at all other races in the buildup.

CoachB wrote:

I was watching "rebuilding the machine" on flotrack (flofilm about the Stanford men's program). At one point the coach tells his guys before a workout something to the effect of, "we're not going to back off the training here so that we can feel good mid season or pre-nats, we're going to keep grinding". I don't remember if that was the exact quote, but that was the sentiment.

So.

Why is it so bad to feel good mid season? I used to be of the mindset that mid season racing and training should be all heavy legged slogging and that any time you backed off mid season, you were failing to put money in the bank for latter on. I've heard many coaches echo the same sentiments.

On the flip side, wouldn't "feeling good" in training indicate that the body has adapted to a work load and is capable of more? If I gave my team a down week mid season and that allowed their bodies to catch up and get a little super-compensation going, wouldn't that allow higher quality training and better racing later on down the road?

Enjoy